Blizzard is dealing with a massive World of Warcraft DDoS attack

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This week was meant to be an exciting one for both Blizzard and World of Warcraft players. Yesterday the Warlords of Draenor expansion launched, bringing with it a number of new features that make the lapsed subscribers think “maybe I’ll go play for a month” and end up staying several. But the launch has been overshadowed in the US by a massive DDoS attack.

Blizzard has been dealing with unexpected stability issues overnight related to just how many players are trying to login and their concentration within zones. That has led to queues for players trying to gain access and understandably a lot of frustration. But the biggest cause of latency on North American servers has been a confirmed Distributed Denial of Service attack.

The attack is thought to have started in China and has been large enough to cause servers to time out, players to disconnect, anfour hour period of downtime is currently in progress (5am – 9am PST) while Blizzard tries to solve the stability issues being caused by the combination of a very large player load and a DDoS. Such a combination is rare and therefore it’s not surprising WoW’s infrastructure is struggling to cope.

The advice for anyone eager to play the new content, or indeed just carry on playing their MMO of choice today, is simply to wait. Hopefully the DDoS will stop before the end of the day and the server update will mean it won’t be a factor over the weekend when even more players will have time to sample Warlords of Draenor.